Muselius is a website with a massive database of over 10,000 museums located throughout the world. Muselius provides information such as description, location, fees, hours, etc. for the museums in their directory.

The Google Earth Blog recently reported on a Network Link for the museums in the Muselius directory and I have added it to the Google Earth Library.

The State of Berlin, Germany has created a massive set of 3D models representing the buildings in Berlin. I’m not sure how many buildings are included, but their website says data was collected for about 500,000 buildings in a 890 square km area.

The data set also contains several other layers that can be viewed with Google Earth, including:

Current 3D model of city

1989 3D model of city

1989 aerial photograph overlay

Historical information and 3D representation of the Berlin Wall

Solar atlas for the city (rooftop locations suitable for solar power installation)

City Information (locations of museums, growth sectors, etc.)

One word of warning. This add-on requires some serious computing resources and fast internet connection. A modern dual core processor and at least 2 gigabytes of RAM are probably minimum necessary specs. When you first open the add-on, uncheck the checkmark next to the its name and then turn on one layer at a time. Otherwise it will try to load everything at once.

The National Register of Historic Places has identified and documented approximately 80,000 districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, and culture. The Register is maintained by the US National Park Service (NPS).

The NPS has created a Google Earth version of the database, which you can find at the National Park Service Google Earth Layers web page. However, the version they created isn’t very user friendly and appears to be out dated.

I’ve used the most current source data (as of November 2009) to create a much more user friendly version of the Registry. Simply download the Network Link from the bottom of the post, zoom in close to a city, and the historic places will automatically show up as you navigate around.

The historic places are separated into Points and Areas. The Points typically represent a single location, such as a house or building. The Areas might represent large areas, such as historic districts. There are approximately 80,000 locations mapped in total.

The placemarks do have some geocoding errors, which are carried over from the source data. I have no plans to correct these. However, I think overall the geocoding appears to be very good.

This collection is not intended to be current, “official” or complete!!. You MUST go to the National Park Service website if current or official information is required.

This collection of moon overlays was originally created before Google released their amazing version of Google Moon (View | Explore menu in Google Earth). I’ve now gone back and updated the original collection of moon overlays to remove duplicate data, remove some broken links, and supplement Google’s Moon data. Unfortunately, I can no longer get the NASA/JPL Moon WMS Server or Map-A-Planet WMS Server to work with Google Earth, so those overlays have been removed.

The following layers are included:

Features - Locations of about 9,000 craters and other lunar features (Originally compiled by Jonathan McDowell).

High Resolution – Grayscale image from Clementine mission with source image from Northwestern University. This is similar to the Visible Imagery layer in Google Moon. I believe my version has a little more detail than Google Moon when zoomed in close to the surface.

Simply open the KML file linked above with Google Earth. Google Earth should ask if you want to switch to Moon mode.

An engineer working in Kenya for Engineers Without Borders contacted me recently about converting some of the maps into overlays for Google Earth, which I was happy to do. These maps can be accessed from the link at the bottom of this post.

I’m not sure how much of a demand there is out there for Google Earth versions of these maps. It would be great if they were all converted into Google Earth overlays, but that would be a huge undertaking. In the meantime, I’d be more than happy to help out any other individuals or groups out there that could benefit from having some of these maps available in Google Earth. I don’t have the resources or time to do all of the maps in the archive, but I can certainly help out with regional efforts. If you have a specific group of maps that you’d like to see added to the Google Earth overlays, contact me.